CNN and Time's Fareed Zakaria Suspended For Plagiarism

[Flagg]

NBCNews.com

CNN and Time magazine's Fareed Zakaria suspended for plagiarism

By Frazier Moore, The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- Time editor-at-large and CNN host Fareed Zakaria has been suspended by both the magazine and the network for lifting several paragraphs by another writer for his use in a recent Time column.

Zakaria apologized Friday, declaring in a statement he made "a terrible mistake," adding, "It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault."

In a separate statement, Time spokesman Ali Zelenko said the magazine accepts Zakaria's apology, but would suspend his column for one month, "pending further review."

"What he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well," Zelenko said.

Shortly afterward, CNN said it had removed from the network's website a blog post that "included similar unattributed excerpts," and taken Zakaria off the air indefinitely.

"CNN has suspended Fareed Zakaria while this matter is under review," said CNN spokeswoman Jennifer Dargan. She said Zakaria's Sunday foreign-affairs program, "GPS," will have its time slots filled in the interim by "Your Money with Ali Veshi" and "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer."

Earlier Friday, media reporters had called attention to similarities between passages in Zakaria's column about gun control that appeared in Time's Aug. 20 issue, and paragraphs from an article on the same subject by Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore published in April in The New Yorker magazine.

In Zakaria's column, titled "The Case for Gun Control," he began one paragraph with the sentences: "Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in 'Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.' Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic."

A corresponding passage in Lenore's New Yorker essay, titled "Battleground America," begins: "As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, 'Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,' firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start."

In Zakaria's statement, he apologized "unreservedly" to Lepore, as well as to his editors and readers.

Hopefully he'll be terminated by both institutions. Though I cannot help but feel that the true crime is inflicting more Wolf Blitzer on poor CNN viewers. All 4 of them.

[Vaporous]

What an idiot. I'm sure they won't let him go, though.

Anyway, Wolf Blitzer is the perfect modern news caster. He's uninteresting, unemotional and uninvolved. You can't imagine him having thoughts, let along biases or opinions. If all you want is a mindless news-droid to recite the headlines in a soulless monotone you can't do better than Wolf.

[Sea Skimmer]

I got a free subscription to time recently and thought it sucked crap for any purpose or politics, with this quality of editorship it is no wonder why.

[Thanas]

^Same here, Klein alone is enough to drive me up the walls. I cancelled mine over a year ago when they refused to admit a mistake they made and continued to make non-apologies.

And people like this get paid to write stuff.

[Edi]

They've also had Charles Craphammer as a columnist since the early 90s. That bastard has never once in his life been right in anything he has written. I also got rid of my subscription well over a year ago and not missing it one bit. They've come down a long way from what they were back in the early to mid-90s.

[Thanas]

Oh, Krauthammer. Yeah, chickenhawk extraordinaire. Another reason not to read it anymore.

The best thing about it were the photos.

[Eleas]

I cancelled mine over a year ago when they refused to admit a mistake they made and continued to make non-apologies.

Just out of curiosity, what mistake was that?

[Thanas]

They completely mischaracterized an amendment regarding wiretapping. They hailed it as a great accomplishment for privacy when in fact it said the complete opposite. they were literally to lazy to read what it said and then did a "while some say it would enhance privacy, others would say it did not" kind of clarification when in fact they were flat wrong.

they also did a few hatchet jobs on Russ Feingold.

[Eleas]

They completely mischaracterized an amendment regarding wiretapping. They hailed it as a great accomplishment for privacy when in fact it said the complete opposite. they were literally to lazy to read what it said and then did a "while some say it would enhance privacy, others would say it did not" kind of clarification when in fact they were flat wrong.

they also did a few hatchet jobs on Russ Feingold.

Thank you. That does sound like the vibe I've been getting from TIME, yeah. Probably why I can't stand reading it.

[Thanas]

It is freaking annoying, too. Read an issue of Time from the sixties and seventies and it is completely different. Discussion and argument mattered back then. I don't know what happened to make it lose so much quality.

[Edi]

I do. The same pussification of the US media that has been steadily getting worse since the 1990s and which can probably be traced back to the rise of Faux Noise.

Because these days you can't call a spade a spade without whiny conservatives getting their panties in a twist and then screaming bloody murder. Why all the other media companies let them get away with it instead of telling them to fuck off and take their screaming fits elsewhere is something I cannot understand.

[Thanas]

That explains some things, but it does not explain the characteristic unwillingness to do fact-checking, simple reading and admitting when you messed up.

[Edi]

No mainstream US media outlet is really willing to do that. Too many too fragile egos at stake to admit that somebody with an internet connection got basic facts right that the high and mighty press priesthood missed.

And obviously it does them no favors, since the facts are there for anyone to check. If they came clean and admitted they were at fault, apologized and then moved forward, they could dismiss any future complaints about it by pointing to that. Now you can hit them over the head with it over and over and over again.

[Block]

No mainstream US media outlet is really willing to do that. Too many too fragile egos at stake to admit that somebody with an internet connection got basic facts right that the high and mighty press priesthood missed.

And obviously it does them no favors, since the facts are there for anyone to check. If they came clean and admitted they were at fault, apologized and then moved forward, they could dismiss any future complaints about it by pointing to that. Now you can hit them over the head with it over and over and over again.

Uh they print retractions all the time, daily in fact in the Washington Post, NY Times, LA times and various other papers. CNN has a set time to do it too although I think it's at midnight for the day before.

[Flagg]

Yeah, Time is a fucking joke. Ever since they picked that assclown Guiliani for person of the year over Bin Laden in 2001 I've stopped reading them completely. They sacrificed their integrity for fear of losing subscribers.

[weemadando]

Yeah, Time is a fucking joke. Ever since they picked that assclown Guiliani for person of the year over Bin Laden in 2001 I've stopped reading them completely. They sacrificed their integrity for fear of losing subscribers.

Ditto. Your own criteria ensured that no one aside from Bin Laden should have come close that year, but nope, you can't acknowledge it.

[Simon_Jester]

...I regret Zakaria doing this, because my feeling is that the man at least has a brain and is a force for thinking when it comes to foreign policy.

And now whatever he says gets auto-discredited, which makes this a stupid move for him.

[mr friendly guy]

Ditto. Zakaria's presentations that I have seen struck me as well thought out. I don't always agree with everything, but he wasn't a loon.

[Spice Runner]

I will third the above sentiment. I did and do occasionally enjoy reading Mr. Zakaria's articles and posts. It's too bad this happened.

[Thanas]

Wonder how many of those he did rip of?

[Simon_Jester]

Thanas, I don't know if you're even slightly familiar with him, but to answer the question: I don't think he ripped off many. If he did, I would dearly love to find the person who wrote all that stuff, because it's hard to imagine them not becoming a high-profile political commentator in their own right.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Studies have shown that the human brain is very poor at internalising rules. Essentially, when people plagiarise on exams, they tended to do so very trivially. Something like 55% of college students cheat on tests, but of that number around 70% don't do so to any great extent. Laziness in the human brain and our inbred desire to find the easiest way to do something no matter what, since that is technically optimum, war with impulses to "do good" and obey the rules. In the plurality of people, the result is cheating--but only a little bit. I suspect this extends pretty far through the world and explains things like multi-billionaire executives getting nailed for a million dollar minor stock swap fraud/trade rules violation as well as something like this. Laws and standards of conduct are absolute--but human concepts of behaviour are not.

Hell, I'll be honest, I think of myself as rigidly law abiding but even for me 70mph becomes 75 on a rural freeway. It's very hard not to engage in that sort of soft obedience somewhere in your life. Some people just end up doing it in more serious subjects than others.

[Simon_Jester]

Plus, for someone with a long career (like Zakaria), it would be very difficult to get away with consistent plagiarism. If he were plagiarizing from many different people, he'd have been caught long ago. Anyone who had read any of the people he plagiarized would be able to reveal him. If he'd been persistently plagiarizing one or two people, then they would know how well he was doing and want their share of the rewards. Unless his source had some kind of weird masochistic literary thing going where they want to write a column without getting any credit or money.

This is why in real life you don't see a lot of old career criminals, and the ones you do see have spent most of their life in jail. If people care about a rule enough to enforce it, and it isn't inherently something you can hide, then you can't break it every day for your whole life without someone noticing.

This isn't about "he's too good to do that," it's simply that if you break the rules all the time you get caught.

If I had to guess, I'd bet that either this one time, or more likely once every few months at most, Zakaria goes "ugh, I have a headache and I need to finish this in an hour... I'm just going to copy-paste this paragraph, it's pretty much right and I like the look of it.

Which is not to say I approve, but it's a very different sort of academic crime from someone whose entire CV is a fraud and a fabrication.

[mr friendly guy]

Why doesn't he just quote the other author, and say "I agree." Ok its lazy and simplifying things, but it won't be plagiarism.

[Darth Wong]

If I had to guess, I'd bet that either this one time, or more likely once every few months at most, Zakaria goes "ugh, I have a headache and I need to finish this in an hour... I'm just going to copy-paste this paragraph, it's pretty much right and I like the look of it.

It seems like an incredibly strange thing to do. I can't imagine it would save that much time compared to re-phrasing it in your own words, and the risk is so high.

Which is not to say I approve, but it's a very different sort of academic crime from someone whose entire CV is a fraud and a fabrication.

Sure, it's not as bad, but that doesn't mean it's not serious because so much of journalism is about presenting an image of "integrity".